March 28, 2007

A Neighborhood Is a Gallery, Its Brick Walls Canvases

By MATT VILLANO

SAN FRANCISCO

A COMMUNITY nonprofit organization tucked away in the vibrant Mission District is a living example of a museum interacting with its environment — a stated goal of the most prominent architects these days.

The organization, the Precita Eyes Mural Arts and Visitors Center, has a modest storefront on 24th Street where visitors can learn about making murals and buy art supplies and postcard pictures of some of the most famous murals in the city’s history. But the Precita Eyes experience stretches well beyond the confines of the tiny shop, and out into the bustling neighborhood that surrounds it.

Take Balmy Alley, a narrow street lined with 30 colorful and larger-than-life murals on garages, fences and buildings. Or St. Peter Roman Catholic Church, on the corner of 24th and Florida, a brick building covered with a wraparound mural that depicts a sea of Latino faces representing 500 years of civil disobedience.

There’s even a two-story mural on the local self-service laundry: a character resembling SpongeBob SquarePants, whose body is a box of detergent.

Over all, Precita Eyes has helped pay for and support nearly 100 murals in and around the Mission, a palette of public art that takes good walking shoes and the better part of a weekend to admire. In a city renowned for its creativity and art, this collection literally turns heads every day.

The wonder of these murals is in their accessibility: enjoying them is free.

What makes murals different from stand-alone artwork are the relationships murals can create with their immediate audience, said Timothy W. Drescher, author of “San Francisco Bay Area Murals.” He noted that “the sounds and smells from the neighborhood, the buildings next door and even the other people on the street around you” contribute to the experience. Mr. Drescher, who was a professor of humanities at San Francisco State University until he retired in 2003, said, “The contexts with murals are so much more complex than what you experience in a museum.”

Perhaps the best way to see the murals of Precita Eyes is on a guided tour.

These begin in the visitors center with a 45-minute slide show that explains the history of the mural movement from Mexico in the 1920s through the work of Diego Rivera, the pre-eminent muralist who painted his first United States work, “The Allegory of California,” in San Francisco in 1931.

The slide show also mentions the Mujeres Muralistas (the women muralists), three women who collaborated on a number of murals in the Mission District in the early 1970s, and hails Susan Cervantes, the woman who founded Precita Eyes. From the slide room, visitors on a tour last month hit the street, where music combining reggae, dancehall and rap — Reggaetón — was blaring from car windows. Henry Sultan, a volunteer guide, led his group across Harrison Street to Balmy Alley, a cobblestone driveway that spans 24th and 25th Streets.

Mr. Sultan described the alley as “the heart of the San Francisco mural movement today,” and positioned the group in front of a fence painted with the images of Maoist women in Nepal. The mural showed a young woman breaking a chain to the past, and a group of women standing in the background, ready to fight for independence.

“Note the way the artist used the grain of the wood to depict wrinkles in their clothes,” Mr. Sultan said of the artist, Martin Travers. “Every little detail becomes part of this piece.”

The group made its way down the alley, and Mr. Sultan, himself a muralist, pointed out similar attention to detail on a Japanimation mural about overcrowding in San Francisco. Later, he stopped to talk about pieces that hinted at violence in South America and the AIDS virus in Africa.

As Mr. Sultan informed the group, drivers rolled by slowly in their cars, taking a quieter, motorized tour of their own.

“They wanted the abbreviated version,” he said with a shrug. “They have no idea what they’re missing.”

Exactly why and how San Francisco became such a popular scene for murals is up for debate. Patricia Rose, tour coordinator for Precita Eyes, said that since the 1930s, public art has embodied the activist spirit of this largely politicized city.

Josh Krist, a San Francisco resident who, with Helene Goupil, wrote “San Francisco: The Unknown City,” added that because the city is very much defined by its neighborhoods, artists representing different ethnic groups see murals as a form of cultural expression. “People say this is a city of villages,” he said. “You name the culture, we have it, and murals are a great way for neighborhoods to show off what makes them special.”

No muralist demonstrates this better than Ernesto Paul. Mr. Paul, who is 50, grew up in San Ysidro, Calif., the last town along Interstate 5 before the Mexican border. He started painting murals to fight freeway expansion in the 1970s, and moved to San Francisco in 1990. Today, Mr. Paul paints with his son, Eric. Together, they have painted murals around the Mission, including a colorful and intriguing series above the Dominguez Bakery down the block from Precita Eyes. The sequence depicts Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, star-crossed lovers who are the main characters in a Romeo-and-Juliet legend about two volcanoes near Mexico City.

“It’s all about keeping the culture of home alive,” said the elder Mr. Paul. “The stories, the legends, the history — in many ways, murals are records of the past.”

Other cities have vibrant mural projects, too: Philadelphia, Chicago and Venice, Calif., to name a few.

Jane Golden, executive director of the Mural Arts Program in Philadelphia, said that while each of these cities supports mural programs differently, they all share the approach of looking at public art as a shared vision of artists and their communities.

“The wonderful thing about murals is that they demonstrate a commitment to diversity and social justice,” she said. “Ultimately, this artwork is the purest expression of a city’s collective voice.”